THE DESERT OR OASIS OF MIDLIFE MARRIAGE
JUNE
Tuesday, June 25
It was bright and blazingly hot, topping ninety degrees, when we pulled up to the Cruise America office in Germantown, Maryland. I waited in line with Sandra Day (our eighty-pound Labrador–golden retriever mix), behind two customers picking up their RVs. Devin and Vivian ventured out to buy some soft drinks for the trip, waiting discreetly until two men completed their drug deal in front of the liquor store two doors down.
This was a dream—or an ordeal, depending on whom you are asking—more than eleven years in the making. From our second date in March 2002, Devin rhapsodized about traveling the country in an RV, stopping in small towns, camping in untouched forests, and at first light, pulling up stakes and hitting the open road. I could imagine few things as pointless, or as boring.
And yet, here we were, receiving last-minute instructions on RV living from the Cruise America manager. Jay was garrulous and theatrical as he showcased the amenities. He opened the narrow shower, apparently built with Kenyan marathoners in mind. He moved to the cabinets, filled with ceramic plates, mugs, and plastic glasses; these would all catapult across the RV when the cabinet doors flew open at the first turn. Looking a little like a game show model, Jay gestured toward the “double bed” in the space above the driver’s seat (clearance: two feet), and then, with a flourish, opened the slatted doors to reveal the back bedroom with the “queen size” bed. He gave no guidance as to how to handle this behemoth. No tips for turning, except to look in the side mirror. No explanations about the generator versus the coach battery versus the gas-powered electricity versus plugging into an electrical outlet; no warning that the tap water was not drinkable, nor an explanation about gray water (from the shower) versus black water (from the toilet) or (most important) how to drain the dirty water from the vehicle. We were clueless. And we were too ignorant to ask.
We said goodbye to Vivian, who would pick us up back here in two weeks, and piled in. Devin climbed into the driver’s seat and, in a scene that would replay itself several times a day, Sandra and I raced for the front passenger seat. She won. I pulled her off and settled in. We scanned the parking lot. Devin turned on the ignition. Before moving the gearshift from Park to Drive, he paused, looked at the traffic racing down the highway, and said, “There’s a mobile home park across the street. Can we stay there for the night?” I still wonder if he was kidding.
LONG-TERM ROMANCE IN THE BRAIN
The person directly responsible for our driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway in a thirty-foot RV is Arthur Aron, a research psychologist at Stony Brook University. Aron has studied the psychology and neurobiology of romantic love and has pondered this conundrum: How can middle-aged couples keep their marriage fresh?
“When you fall in love,” he told me, “it’s exhilarating, it’s exciting, you feel that your world has expanded. You share memories. Then it slows down.”
That much I knew, having fallen breathlessly, rapturously in love with Devin eleven years earlier, spending every minute together and telling my closest friends shortly after we met that “you can get on board or off, but this train is leaving the station.” He was forty and I was forty-three on our wedding day, my first marriage, his second. But too quickly, the stresses of merging the lives of two independent, seasoned adults began to drain the romance like oil leaking from an engine, a process accelerated by my long hours covering the Justice Department for NPR and Devin’s lengthy commute to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. And we had it easy. We didn’t even have children living at home.
But some couples defy gravity, Aron insisted. About one third of couples in long-term marriages claim to be intensely in love.1 He wondered if their brains would confirm it. He decided to find out.
The first task was to identify what romantic love looks like in the brain. To do that, Aron and his collaborator, Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and the chief scientific advisor for Match.com, recruited people who had recently fallen in love, and asked them to gaze at photos of their beloved while lying in a brain scanner. What the scans revealed upended their definition of love.
“I had always felt that romantic love was an emotion,” Helen Fisher told me. “But when I saw those brain scans, I realized, ‘Oh my goodness, the basic traits of romantic love are produced by the reward system in the brain.’”
The emotional center of the brain was quiet, she said, while another area of the brain lit up. “It’s linked with drive, motivation, focus, and goal-oriented behavior. Those are not emotions.”
When you fall in love—romantic love, not the lust of a one-night stand—you feel the urgency of hunger after a day-long fast, the obsessiveness of thirst on a hot day, even the kind of craving associated with cocaine, since romantic love releases a flood of dopamine throughout the brain. Oxytocin—the cuddle hormone that bonds mother and child, and man and woman—spreads through your brain. Aron said this is not a luxury reserved for the young.
“People who are sixty and newly in love are like people who are twenty and newly in love. And like seven-year-olds having a crush,” he added.
That is new love. What about seasoned love? Aron and Fisher found seventeen people in their fifties and sixties, married an average of twenty-one years, who insisted they still felt passionate love for their spouses.
“We looked at ourselves and said, ‘Are they lying?’” Fisher recalled. “So we put them in the machine and, sure enough, we find the same activity in the [reward and drive areas of the brain] as we did among those who had just fallen happily in love. But we found some differences.”
Specifically, they found that brain areas linked to attachment grew active in long-term couples, while they remained quiet in the recently besotted. This is the kind of marathon love that spells commitment and prompts two people to raise children together. If long-term love seems calmer, less painful, and less anxious than the frenzy of new love, there is good reason, neurologically. Gazing at a valued long-term partner ramps up areas rich in opioids and serotonin, which increases pleasure and reduces pain; in fact, doctors target these areas to moderate anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. That twenty-year marriage is better than a pharmacy: cheaper, and with a few recreational drugs thrown in.
Good for them, I thought, but if your seasoned marriage is punctuated by distraction and exhaustion as much as fireworks and chemistry, how do you revive the romance? How do you navigate from Archie and Edith Bunker to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward? You can do this, Art Aron says, by infusing one element into your life.
Novelty.
Long before brain scans told us that romantic love is a drive—something the brain considered a necessity for our ancestors to survive and procreate—Aron was thinking about date nights. He divided fifty-three seasoned couples (married on average fifteen years) into three groups. He asked a third of them to spend ninety minutes once a week doing something familiar and pleasant, such as going to a movie. He asked another third to go dancing, skiing, see a concert, or something else out of their routine. The third group was not assigned any activity. After ten weeks, the couples with novel date nights reported significantly more marital satisfaction than the couples who went to a movie or trundled on as before.2 He followed this with another study that had some couples crawl across a room with their ankles and wrists Velcroed together, carrying a pillow between them, while other couples performed a boring task, in which one person rolled a ball across a room while on his hands and knees, while the spouse watched.3 Those with the “novel” task reported more happiness with their relationship, as well as greater acceptance of their partner.4
Now we know why. The brain rewards novel activity and craves surprises. No wonder couples that infuse novelty into their relationships feel a little dopamine-driven reward, a little cocaine-like high, a little oxytocin-mediated closeness, all of which leads to romance.
As I considered how I could test this premise in my own marriage, I envisioned my husband, a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in understanding war, terrorism, and nuclear deterrence, crawling across a gym mat with a pillow between us. No, I realized, he would rather die on one of his beloved nuclear weapons. What to do? I knew instantly. I tried to strangle the idea before it could cry out, but then I let it live, for the greater good of science—and our marriage.
I called Cruise America.
When I told Art Aron that he had inspired our two-week RV trip, he sighed.
“The only thing I’d say from the research and from the theory, both, is that you don’t want it to be overly stressful,” he said, perhaps perceiving that an introvert (Devin) and extrovert (me) might do some damage in such close quarters.
“It’s good to have excitement and novelty and challenge up to a point,” Aron said, “but if it gets really stressful or difficult or upsetting, then it’s not good.”
But seeing that I was committed—we had put down a deposit—Aron offered to conduct a basic test. Devin and I should each draw a picture before the trip, which we were not to show each other. Each picture must include Devin and me, a car, a house, and a tree. We should draw another picture upon our return, put all the artwork in an envelope, and send it off to him for analysis.
That night, I asked Devin to draw a picture including him and me, a car, a house, and a tree. He looked at me for a long moment, as if I were speaking Dutch. I waited expectantly. He pulled out a yellow pad and began to draw.
Wednesday, June 26
Last night we rolled into Candy Hill Campground in Winchester, Virginia, a little past eight. The lanky, weathered manager took one look at our RV, with the vistas of the Badlands and the Grand Canyon painted on the sides, along with “800-RV4-Rent,” and walked briskly inside.
“They shouldn’t go in site seventeen,” he said to the woman at the register, assigning spaces. “They have one of those rented vehicles,” disdain surging through his voice. Apparently, rented RVs have short hoses for water and waste. We needed a space where we could snuggle right up to the “dump” holes and the water spigot.
He directed us to another site and we drove into it. We plugged into the electrical outlet and waited for the air-conditioning to turn on. Nothing. We began to perspire. Devin pulled out the manual. Unfortunately, it was written generically for numerous RV models, so none of the diagrams—of the water, refrigerator, heater, air conditioner—looked vaguely like what we saw in front of us. I just began pushing buttons.
By ten p.m., Sandra Day was panting hard, I had stripped down to shorts and sleeveless shirt, and Devin had thrown the manual back in the drawer. I envisioned the vacation unfolding before us, and it looked hot and muggy. But I knew what to do. I waited until Devin took Sandra for a walk, then darted to the plush RV next to us—even in the world of RVing, there is the 1 percent—and knocked.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” I said to the grandfatherly man who answered. “This is our very first night in the RV and for some reason we can’t get the air-conditioning on.”
He grabbed his flashlight.
“I’m Durham, as in Bull,” he said,
“I’m Barb, as in embarrassed to ask you to help us at this time of night.”
“No problem,” he said generously. He walked to the electrical outlet by our camper, flipped the switch, and the RV came roaring to life.
“I guess you turned off the electricity when you plugged in,” he said, embarrassed for us. I realized that all our advanced degrees and pointy-headed accomplishments would get us nowhere in this new world. We would need many Durhams as the trip unfolded.
That night, drifting off in our cool RV, I realized we had unwittingly demonstrated a key discovery about long-term marriage. Generally, marriage research is overwhelming and emphatic on one point: Opposites attract, then attack. People who share personality traits, worldviews, education levels, and conflict styles tend to have happier marriages than those who do not. I found this disquieting, since Devin and I often seem to inhabit different planets.
But there is a major exception relevant to midlife marriages—not always but often. After the first few years, couples who do not share traits report that they are happier than look-alike couples.5 Early on, young couples are exploring the world together, and sharing personality traits such as extroversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness makes the sailing smooth. Midlife, however, is about getting things done: raising kids, paying bills, juggling two careers, enjoying a social life if possible. Two conscientious people may fight over who handles the family finances better, while the kids’ playdates go unscheduled. If a conscientious person is married to an extrovert, that family would pay the bills and see friends for dinner.
So it is in the Hagerty world. Devin is the Secretary of Transportation, figuring out the logistics of life, keeping the cars running, the bills paid, mapping out the best route from D.C. to Roanoke. I am the Secretary of State, calling the plumber, making appointments with the dentist, asking how to turn on the air-conditioning in the RV, and generally interacting with the world. We split up tasks: The quiet ones that require precision go to my introverted husband, the public ones go to me.
Our differences in style can create a little tension. But on our RV adventure, we reveled in them. Today I biked twenty-seven miles along the Blue Ridge Parkway, racing along the sun-dappled road until I was exhausted. Ever since arthritis in my right knee ended my running days a year ago, robbing me of a daily ritual that kept me sane and healthy for the past thirty-five years, I had discovered a new passion: cycling. Running mile after mile ground me down, but on my bike, I felt light as air. Today I could contain myself no longer. I burst into song:
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog [bah-bah-bum],” I panted. “Was a good friend of mine [bah-bah-bum] . . .”
In those moments, I was not a married fifty-something peddling up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway. I was in my friend Betsy’s basement, two seventh-graders playing the record again and again, singing “Joy to the World,” shouting harmony into imaginary microphones.6
For a few minutes, I sloughed off my middle-aged estate. For the length of that ride, I was twelve years old again.
Devin and Sandra Day drove ahead and waited, as they would do every day. When I rolled up, Devin was sitting in his $9.99 Walmart lawn chair, reading a book. We were both so happy we could burst. I realized that Art Aron was right. Venturing out of our familiar world could be just what our marriage needs. I suspect this may, just may, become The Best Vacation Ever.
BABY BOOMER MARRIAGE ON LIFE SUPPORT—OR NOT
If anything captures the confounding complexity of middle-aged marriage, it was Al and Tipper Gore’s slightly R-rated, nationally televised kiss at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. When I saw it, I thought: Here is hope. Here is visual evidence that you can keep passion alive. And then, in 2010, the Gores announced they were separating.
The hard evidence suggests that midlife marriage is frayed and breaking. One quarter of all the people who divorce these days are over fifty—more than twice the rate of our parents’ generation. Even as the overall divorce rate is tailing off overall, baby boomers continue to break records.
It is what Susan Brown calls the “gray divorce revolution.”7 Brown, a researcher at Bowling Green State University, says the revolution was sparked by a combination of trends. First, boomers started their (first) marriages during the 1970s and 1980s, just when states were making it easy to end a marriage. Later, in their second marriages, these couples were more likely to split up. Previously divorced people are far more willing—two and a half times more willing—to divorce a second time.8
“They know that life goes on after divorce,” Brown says, “and so these individuals are willing to call it quits if they’re dissatisfied.”
Researchers say that midlife divorce has a different feel and character from an early breakup.9 Those who split up in the first seven years tend to do so with pots, pans, and epithets flying. The fourteenth year of marriage sees another spike in divorces. But these couples are distant, passionless, and cool; they have suppressed their negative emotions and allowed their affection to shrink to a dust mote. These marriages are emotionally dead.
Which is where the “Viagra theory” comes into play, says Russell Collins, a marriage therapist in Santa Barbara, California. Baby boomers live longer and more vitally than any generation in history. Collins says he suspected his own parents were hardly thrilled with their marriage, but if you live only a few years after retirement, what’s the point of divorcing?
“I think people see themselves living another twenty-five years and they feel vital and healthy, and so they’re saying, ‘You know, there’s another chapter to be lived.’”
Most often, Collins says, the wives are the ones who envision a chapter without their current husbands; and for the first time in history, they can afford to. “Women are increasingly more likely now to say, ‘I’m not happy. I’ve got plenty of dough in the bank. I’ve got my own career and I don’t need you anymore,’” Collins notes.
But if health and financial independence are precipitating causes, many researchers see something else as the root cause, something unique to baby boomers: namely, the mind-set of the “me” generation. Today’s marriages are in service to a larger goal of self-fulfillment for both husband and wife.
“If our marriage is not cutting it, divorce is an acceptable solution,” Susan Brown says. “And the bar for cutting it has risen. So if, historically, being the traditional wife and mother was enough for a woman, and being a good provider and earner was enough for a man, that’s not true today. Now women have to be good providers, too, and men have to be involved fathers, and do half the housework. And the spouse has to be your best friend. And you have to have a good sex life, and on and on the list goes. It’s a high bar to achieve, let alone maintain for decades.”
Not everyone, of course, is wringing her hands over the gray divorce revolution. Helen Fisher, for one, is “extremely optimistic about the future of relationships for many, many reasons.”
Fisher argues that marriage had to be shaken up: It used to be a trap, especially for women, whose only career choice was to marry well. The divorce revolution is a correction, like losing two hundred points in the Dow. It will recover.
“One hundred years ago, the vast majority of men and women had to choose the right person from the right background, with the right kin connection, the right social attributes, the right economic background, and from the right religion,” she says. “None of that is important anymore.”
This may not be universally true, but she has a point: Externals such as money and religion now take a backseat to internals such as love and commitment. If the marriage doesn’t stick, that is a good thing, too.
“People don’t walk out of good marriages,” Fisher says. “We’re walking out of bad marriages and some demographers believe that we will now have much better marriages, because bad marriages can end.”
So which is it? Is marriage in midlife dying a swift and agonizing death, or remaking itself in a newer, fresher form? Eli Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, says marriages today are both better and worse. It just depends on one’s level of privilege.
Finkel notes that divorces doubled between 1960 and 1980. In that time, professional couples with college or graduate degrees were almost as likely to break up as those with high school diplomas and blue-collar jobs. Since 1980, the divorce rate has steadied, but the divorce gap between the more and less educated has ballooned.10 Those with only high school diplomas are three times as likely to divorce as the college educated.
Marriage, he says, has become a luxury good. Couples who can afford nannies or regular babysitters, who can go on frequent date nights or jet off for romantic vacations—those people have won the marriage lottery.
“Those few marriages,” Finkel says, “are experiencing a level of marital bliss that people didn’t have access to before.”
What about the rest?
Finkel says middle-class marriages are under stress as well, not only because of economics but also because of soaring expectations. Gone are the days when marriage revolved around creating an economic unit to raise a family and provide food, shelter, and protection, as it did until around the 1850s. Gone, too, are the marriages that centered on companionship, love, and raising a family with specific gender roles, as was the case until the 1960s. Today’s couples, Finkel says, want to be fulfilled emotionally, professionally, and romantically—and they want their partners to help them realize all their dreams. He compares it to the highest rung on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: You are expected to “deeply understand the essence, the psychological dreams and hopes and internal battles that characterize your spouse in a way that wasn’t anywhere near as important in these previous eras.”
It sounds exhausting. To create that kind of marital paradise, couples need lots of good quality time.
“The problem is that if you look at the evidence, on average, Americans aren’t managing to do that,” Finkel says. “People without children are working longer hours. People with children are parenting like maniacs, which is fine. I’m not judging it as negative, I’m just saying that if you’re putting so much time into work or so much time into the children, you are finding very little time for your spouse. That state of affairs is uniquely bad for today’s marriages.”
DEPOSITS, WITHDRAWALS, AND MIDLIFE LOVE
I could throw a stone in any direction and find dissatisfied midlife couples that fit this description. A trickier feat is locating an exceedingly happy couple. I happened on one couple that has experienced both unhappiness and contentment across the course of two marriages, and could talk with me about their journey from the desert to the oasis of love.
Mary Lou O’Brian and Anton Struntz are sitting on their couch in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She, at sixty-one, has improbably lustrous brown hair, the glasses of a cool librarian, and a gentle, wide smile. He, at fifty-nine, has no hair and a nicely shaped head, a wiry build, and eyes that seem to suggest an inside joke. Her arm is casually tossed over his leg, his arm around her shoulder. They fit together like two pieces of a puzzle; their sentences seem incomplete without a comment from the other, a small detail, a laugh, a memory, not in a competitive way, but elaborating, complementing, complimenting.
As I listened to them, I realized that this is the quintessential married couple in the twenty-first century: casualties of high expectations, and beneficiaries of the new science of marriage.
Anton’s first marriage began to unravel almost immediately. He and his wife had both grown up in rural areas, but, he said, “that’s where the similarities ended.” Anton was “a softie,” she was a little more hard-edged; he was laid-back, she was hard-charging. Adopting a seven-year-old girl with a troubled background brought more chaos into the already fragile marriage.
“My first marriage was always a struggle,” Anton recalls. “I was exhausted all the time, wondering, What’s it going to be like today?”
They divorced after eleven years.
Mary Lou’s first marriage survived seven years. She was an extrovert with a large circle of friends. Her first husband, an introvert, focused on his career as an attorney. At first she could gloss over the differences. Then she couldn’t.
“I was not confident enough in my first marriage to demand a person I was more compatible with,” Mary Lou says. “He needed a support person. I took care of life so he could excel. It got to the point where I wanted more.”
As Mary Lou and her first husband began to live socially and emotionally separate lives, she opened a calligraphy business, and he decided to move to New York for a job in another law firm.
“I thought, Oh no. That’s just the death of me,” she recalls. “And at that point I realized I must not really love this person anymore, because I would have followed him to the end of the world, and now I’m starting to see that if I go with him, that’s the end of me. And I felt, Okay, I have to make a decision here.”
These are twenty-first-century midlife divorces, as described by marriage researchers John Gottman and Robert Levenson: no physical abuse, no fatal explosions, just two people with diverging values and dreams, drifting quietly apart.
After her divorce, Mary Lou “spent the next fifteen years dating and crashing and burning, with young, buff men. It was my wild stage. And it was hard meeting someone at fifty.”
One day, a friend sat her down.
“She said, ‘Try eHarmony, because they don’t let you pick your own people. They send you people who they think would make good partners for you.’ I thought, Oh, that might be good for me because clearly I’m not doing a good job on my own.”
eHarmony’s premise is that a marriage relationship is like a bank account. Similarities—or what it calls “dimensions of compatibility”—are like deposits. Differences are like withdrawals. Some differences are fine if you have a large enough balance, but too many, and you eventually overdraw your account. Some researchers consider that theory simplistic. And many adults looking for love consider eHarmony paternalistic, with its 240-or-so-question application (it varies) and its insistence that the company, not you, make the first pass at a match. But Mary Lou liked it. So did Anton.
“One of the things I liked about it was I had to take the time to really think about what I wanted instead of just saying, ‘Oh well, I’m going to run into somebody and the fireworks will go off and there will be love forever after,’” Anton says. “No. I had to think: What do I want in somebody?”
When eHarmony matched them up, Mary Lou was puzzled: They seemed to have little in common. She grew up in Argentina; her father was an accountant for a mining company there. She assumed she would relate best to another expat. Anton rarely strayed from rural Maryland, where his working-class parents owned a bar. She was used to (although she didn’t much like) operatic relationships; he preferred a “slow simmer.”
But to their surprise—and this is one of eHarmony’s key arguments—background and even interests do not create a good match. The secret is similar values and approach to the world.
“We’re so much alike that oftentimes I joke we’re the same person,” Mary Lou says. “It’s a good thing we happen to like ourselves because when we married each other, we married ourselves.”
“We bought each other the same book for Christmas,” Anton says, laughing. “We like a lot of the same things. We think the same things. It’s never been a struggle.”
I asked them how their relationship—married eight years, together for ten—differs from their first marriage.
“I don’t ever feel any clashing,” Mary Lou says. “There are no threats, no jagged edges. And it’s so much fun with Anton. Everything is more fun with Anton.”
When I left, they were working on the Washington Post crossword puzzle. Before they met, Anton had told me, they could each complete only half the Sunday crossword puzzle. Now they finish it together every week.
I wondered how to reconcile Mary Lou and Anton’s simpatico relationship—with their shared values, styles, and even sentence structure—with the research suggesting that different styles and personalities bolster a marriage at midlife. I realized that differing styles and skills may allow a midlife marriage to run more smoothly in the midst of children and playdates, careers and aging parents, but it’s not necessarily true that opposites attract after the chaos of midlife subsides. For this reason, Mary Lou and Anton’s marriage looks like a young marriage, without children and the attendant complexities. In this they have much company among middle-aged people on their second marriage—my own marriage, for example.
Still, when I drove away, I remained a little skeptical. How many couples could boast this kind of frictionless marriage? And I had trouble believing this simple idea—a bank account, for Pete’s sake—held the key to long-lasting love.
Wednesday, June 26 (continued)
It is 8:16 p.m. and I am writing in the near dark. We arrived two hours ago at the KOA Charlottesville campground. We have figured out how to hook up to the electricity and how to pour the gray water into the dump hole, although we have vowed never to use the bathroom in the RV so we don’t have to dump the “black water.” This will probably not last long, especially after we pick up our friends Jack and Beth, who will be traveling with us for eight days.
We have finished our dinner of Triscuits, cheese, and salami. I am no cook at home, much less in the wilds of RV living. Devin has a stack of magazines; my legs ache deliciously from my long, hilly bike ride. I feel totally at peace, our RV adventure spreading out before us, one languid day after another.
“Can we just live here?” I venture. “I bet we could get an excellent deal.”
Devin looks at me a long moment.
“I wonder what it’s like being Barb,” he says.
“I wonder what it’s like being Devin,” I respond.
Even after more than a decade, we are a puzzle to each other.
Twelve years earlier, I was forty-two years old, with no time to date. Covering the Justice Department for NPR in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks left me few hours to sleep, much less plot my romantic life. It had always been this way. I had always privileged work above all else, and in this I am not much different from other news reporters. Except that they managed to find love, settle down, and have children. How did they do that?
A few days before Christmas 2001, I dropped by the house of my good friend Libby Lewis to deliver a present. Her fiancé happened to be there, although in retrospect it seems more calculated than that. As I was leaving, he said he had something serious to tell me.
“You need to increase your numbers,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have time for blind dates. You need to see the profiles of one hundred men, pick one or two quality dates, and ignore the others. You need to go on Match.com.”
After some resistance—I dreaded writing a profile—I signed up. For six months.
Three weeks and several hundred e-mails later, I received a charming, self-deprecating, funny, and—this was crucial—grammatically correct note from an extraordinarily cute guy.
When we finally met, some six weeks later, Devin and I had developed an old-fashioned relationship based on well-crafted e-mails. From his profile, I thought Devin was an outgoing, gregarious man who, raised as a diplomat’s son, had a taste for elegant parties. In truth, Devin generally avoids parties and loves nothing more than staying home with a good book. From my profile, Devin thought I was a low-maintenance, sophisticated news reporter who lived for deadlines. The truth is I love nothing more than hiking or biking in the wilderness, and deadlines make me break into a cold sweat.
We managed to keep up the pretense for many months. Only after the wedding did we fully recognize the chasm between perception and reality. When I pointed that out shortly after our honeymoon, Devin explained, paraphrasing Chris Rock: “Oh, that was just our representatives courting each other.”
Not only were our Match.com personae nothing like the reality; we were nothing like each other, in terms of background and style. Devin spent most of his childhood in South Asia and Europe. I lived most of my life in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Devin’s international school barely mentioned SATs, much less college preparation and applications. My all-girls private school thought of little else but the Ivy League. Devin was raised without religion and was an accomplished partier at university. I was raised a Christian Scientist and ordered my first glass of wine at forty. Devin is an introvert, an observer. I am a reluctant extrovert (by necessity, not choice) whose first instinct is to grab the phone and ask questions. He loves watching sports; I don’t see the point, when you could be playing the game yourself. Devin’s careful deliberations can drive me to distraction. My lightning-fast reactions leave him feeling like a spectator at a rodeo, watching a bucking bronco.
You can imagine, perhaps, why I was not keen on research suggesting that similar couples are more likely to go the distance. Yet I knew I needed to enter the lion’s den.
THE CALCULUS OF LOVE
I arrived at eHarmony’s gleaming headquarters in Santa Monica for an eight-thirty a.m. interview with the company’s founder, Neil Clark Warren. If anyone could offer me some twenty-first-century insights about lasting love, I thought, it would be this near octogenarian with an Internet dating service.
There has been surprisingly little research into what sustains marriage through the peaks, valleys, rough seas, and deserts of middle age. That research involves relatively few American couples: studies of two hundred couples at the most, and usually more like a few dozen. And it seems to be driven by hunches gleaned from examining people’s behavior in a laboratory or their answers to questions. But a large trial, with hundreds of thousands of participants, testing the marathon qualities needed for marriage—now that is a modern study of midlife love.
Only one company has claimed its algorithms can find you lasting love. eHarmony launched its dating site in 2000, thirteen years earlier—not a long time, but time enough to see who made it through the seven-year hump, who didn’t, and how to tweak their algorithms to increase the probability of love that would last.
Neil Clark Warren and I settled into two comfortable leather chairs in his spotless, airy office. As anyone knows from his ubiquitous television advertisements, the founder, who was then seventy-nine, looks like a grandfather, with a ruddy face, soft white hair, blue eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He reminded me of Mr. Rogers, leaning forward to hear me in a pastoral way, speaking in a soft lilt, using small words. His demeanor deceives: It is easy to underestimate this man with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, this genteel man with 1950s manners who created an Internet juggernaut when he was past retirement age.
Just as I was turning on the tape recorder, he stopped me.
“Let’s just chat a little while,” he said. “I want to get to know you a little bit.”
So we chatted for upward of two hours, and whenever I spoke, he watched me closely, like a psychiatrist, and with the earnestness of the evangelical Christian he is.
When we were bringing our informal chat to a close, Dr. Warren gazed into my eyes and said, “Barbara, I think every person should have five or six very close friends. I think I would like to have you as a friend.”
“Dr. Warren, I’m so flattered. Thank you,” I said, flustered. Then, feeling a little silly, I added, “I’d like to be your friend, too.”
I suppose when you near eighty, you strip down to the bare essentials, the playground essentials. In the playground, Neil Clark Warren wasn’t interested in running a company or sorting through other people’s marital problems. He wanted a friend. Or else he was playing me. But my instinct says no.
Warren founded eHarmony to prevent the devastation he had seen during his forty years as a psychotherapist and marriage counselor, futilely trying to save troubled marriages and watching helplessly as countless engaged couples hurtled toward a cliff.
“I probably have presided over the funerals of more marriages than anybody in America,” he said. “You just can’t make a mismatched marriage work happily.”
Warren realized that all the counseling in the world would fail if a couple was fundamentally incompatible. He concluded that the time to take action was before the marriage, before the engagement, even if possible before the first date, when chemistry can hijack one’s better judgment. Warren believes the problem—and certainly one of the root causes of the gray divorce revolution playing out today—is that in today’s culture, people make arguably the most important decision of their lives on a very narrow set of dimensions.
“For instance, if you like their looks and if you like their sense of humor and if you think they’re bright and if you can kind of carry on a meaningful communication and if the two of you like to neck,” he said, pausing to see if I understood the term, “if you have that kind of chemistry, then you ought to marry the person. And what I came to after a while was there are a lot more dimensions than that.”
Warren realized the Internet would provide a perfect laboratory for reverse engineering from great long-term marriages. He and a small cohort of researchers surveyed five thousand married couples, asking them to fill out long questionnaires describing their values, interests, and characteristics, as well as their happiness with the relationship.
“We looked at a lot of people who had good marriages, a lot of people who had bad marriages, and we tried to get a handle on what are the differences,” said Grant Langston, one of the original eHarmony cohort. “The people that have ‘A’ marriages, what do they have going for them? And what do we not see in the ‘F’ marriages, for lack of a better term?”
They found twenty-nine differences between happy and unhappy couples, giving rise to eHarmony’s famous twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility.11 Some rise to the top: You should be in the same ballpark of intelligence, energy level and sexual passion, ambition, sociability, and fighting style (two shouters are better than a shouter and calm, reasoned arguer). eHarmony’s statistical analysis, Warren told me, meshed with decades of research suggesting that people who share similar personality traits and values find more happiness over the long term than those who don’t.
eHarmony has been criticized for trying to match you with your identical twin, but that is not, actually, what they are doing. They don’t care much about interests. They aren’t worried about sending an opera lover on a date with a gangsta-rap aficionado. In fifty years—in the course of raising children, changing careers, coping with sickness or unemployment, taking care of elderly parents—differing tastes in music probably won’t matter much. What will matter is whether they share fundamental values, traits, and style in approaching the world.
Early evidence suggests eHarmony is onto something. An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported on a survey of nearly twenty thousand people married between 2005 and 2012 that found that couples who met on eHarmony had the lowest rate of divorce or separation of all couples—though not much lower than those who met online at other sites such as Match.com. eHarmony couples (and all couples meeting online) fared better than those who met offline, at church, work, sports bars, through friends, and the like. eHarmony couples also reported the greatest marital satisfaction of any dating site. The differences were small but significant.12
Eli Finkel at Northwestern University, who is one of eHarmony’s biggest critics, stipulated that eHarmony may create slightly happier and longer-lasting marriages.
“But that’s separate from whether their algorithm works,” he told me. “Basically, what they are is a fancy country club. So if you’re willing to pay your sixty bucks a month and you want to go to the place that says specifically that people interested in casual dating shouldn’t come here, and we’re a good place for traditionally minded people, I’m not surprised that you end up with a decent marriage rate. That’s plausible to me, not because their algorithm works, but because of the way they’ve marketed themselves, and because of their expense.”
“Well, sounds good to us!” Warren responded, when I relayed the criticism. “If people come to us who are serious about marriage, that delights us.”
He also insists that their algorithms predict long-term marital happiness.
THE DISCONNECT THAT LEADS TO DIVORCE
I thought eHarmony’s core idea sounded pretty simple, and wondered: If all you have to do is find someone with whom you share fundamental values, why are so many marriages breaking up in midlife? Then I spent ninety minutes with Steve Carter, the company’s vice president of matching and the brains behind the algorithms. I began to grasp the magnitude of the problem—not only for eHarmony, but for all those people who are looking for love, only to divorce years later.
Carter told me that many researchers and therapists agree about what makes a couple compatible for the long term: personality, values, and learned traits such as traditionalism.
“We built really powerful models for predicting which people, once they chose to get married, would end up being happy,” he said. “But the compatibility algorithms really did a poor job of predicting attraction, of predicting who was going to want to talk to each other.”
Why would that be?
“You don’t choose who you’re going to get into a relationship with based on compatibility,” Carter said, in obvious frustration. “People basically marry at random.”
People are not farsighted, he said. They enter relationships based on things like height or weight or the color of her eyes, on salary or profession or loyalty to the Red Sox, on whether the person lives in the same city or whether they feel an immediate spark. Not only are those things random, Carter said, but they pale in importance next to factors such as integrity or energy level or intelligence.
In the old days, Carter noted, before we were so independent, before we married for love, society had a way of zeroing in on a compatible long-term mate.
“It was up to your parents to choose: Is this suitor appropriate for you?” he said. “It had a lot to do with the parents making their decisions based on things that they know are important that you are not aware of yet. That you won’t become aware of until it’s too late.”
Most people would not willingly return to arranged marriages or matchmakers, so eHarmony decided to fill the gap and offer the long view. It believed it had solved one side of the equation: selecting a match with the eye of a parent or a professional matchmaker. But it was stumped by the other half of the equation: How do you persuade people who would be compatible for decades to become interested in each other in the first place? Given that dating often leads to marriage, how do you take the randomness out of dating?
Carter tried to crack that nut for years. He tried inferential and statistical models. He worked with a famous mathematician from Italy and a computer scientist from Cambridge University. He tried big machine data learning, running through millions of cases to try to build a model that would predict attraction.
“Did it work?” I asked.
Carter shrugged helplessly. “It is still an unsolved science.”
And it hit me: Could this be one clue as to why so many baby boomers are divorcing in record numbers? That they, like eHarmony, have not found the way to work backward from the future to the present, from long-term compatibility to short-term attraction? And who can blame us? Who can see the future? All we can see is that cute guy in front of us.
This is why, Grant Langston said, eHarmony wants people to trust them.
“One of our main jobs here at eHarmony is to help people keep an open mind,” Langston confessed. I thought of Mary Lou hoping to find someone with her international background. “We tend to make the pool shallow by the prejudices that we bring to the process. ‘Oh, I can’t be with this, Oh, I can’t be with that, I don’t like this, I don’t like that.’ Well, the pool isn’t as shallow as you think it is. So we help people entertain the idea of meeting somebody who’s not their type.”
What, I asked him, is the surprise ingredient that gives a relationship its staying power?
“The thing that is most important to a relationship’s success above all the others is really adaptability,” Langston instantly responded. “Because if you have adaptability, then the natural changes that happen in people—you’re not the same as you were ten years ago, right?—you can ride through those changes. The terrible things that can happen in life, the mundane things that can happen in life—those don’t destabilize the relationship because both of you are adaptable and can understand ‘Hey, we need to morph a little bit this way so we can deal with this issue.’ Two people who are highly adaptable are going to have a great relationship, all other things being equal.”
I put the question to Dr. Warren: Is there any advice he would give people in midlife marriage?
“First of all, don’t let yourself believe that myth that there are some marriages out there that are perfect,” Warren said, slipping into a pastoral role.
No partner checks every box. If you abandon a pretty good marriage to find the missing boxes, he said, “oftentimes, you lose more than you gain.”
“The biggest thing that makes a marriage work,” Dr. Warren continued—and now I’m on the edge of my seat—“is to pick the right person in the first place.”
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW WAS THERE AT THE ALTAR
After visiting eHarmony, I turned to Thomas Bradbury, a psychology professor and prominent marriage researcher at UCLA. “How critical is it,” I asked, “that two people are similar?”
“The thing that matters most is just your personality,” Bradbury assured me. “You might get a little bit of a bump from the similarity to your partner, but what really matters is: Are you an agreeable person? Are you an open person? Are you low on negative emotionality? That is going to get you really far.”
Bradbury has tracked the course of couples’ marriages from honeymoon to midlife. He believes you can trace marital bliss or destruction to the wedding day or even earlier. He calls this the “raw materials model.”
“You look at your partner at the altar and you say, ‘Everything that matters is true of us right now. Everything that is going to decide our fate is pretty much here right now.’”
Your personalities, your communication styles, and your personal histories—where you grew up, for example, whether you grew up in privilege or poverty, with education or not, whether your parents fought—will determine the success or failure of a relationship.13
Research supports this. Ted Huston at the University of Texas at Austin found that the seeds of divorce were planted by the first few months of marriage. The early patterns persisted over time: Those who treated each other kindly and affectionately usually enjoyed long and happy marriages. Turbulent courtships (including those that had the passion of a Hollywood film, and about the same length) foreshadowed unhappiness and divorce.14
The long and happy marriages were marked by a “warm amiability,” Huston told me. “There was friendship coupled with a romantic and sexual relationship, and there was less urgency about the relationship. In some ways, the courtships, because they lacked drama, seem to an outsider to be very boring.”15
But is the die cast on the wedding day? Can’t a couple change and learn to accommodate each other?
“I think you can,” Bradbury said. “But you are changing it within the constraints that are largely in place from the beginning.”
The “old school” model of therapy argues that to be happy, each partner must change the way he or she relates to the other and, in particular, how the two fight. The therapy industry is built on that premise.
“But there is another model in ascendance right now,” Bradbury said. “It says that actually what you need to do is accept your partner for who they are, and then they will change.”
This was the conclusion reached by David Burns, a psychiatrist and cognitive therapist who persuaded twelve hundred adults, mainly in middle- to long-term marriages, to submit to interviews and a detailed questionnaire about married life.16 He asked about finances, sex, recreational activities, raising children, household chores, and relationships with friends and relatives. He inquired about how much love they felt for their partners, how committed they were to their relationships, and how guilty, anxious, trapped, depressed, inferior, frustrated, or angry they felt. He poured all this data into the computer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was then on the faculty. He was looking for the five or ten factors that would determine whether a couple would have a long and happy married life or a short, nasty, and brutish one. He found one factor: blame.
Burns calls blame “the atom bomb of intimacy.” Don’t blame your partner, he argues. Fix yourself. When you begin working on your own issues, then your partner will change, too.
WE, THE WIFE, AND DNA
Thursday, June 27
We had just pulled into Glen Maury RV park near Lexington, Virginia, when one of the other campers strolled over.
“Something’s wrong with your truck,” he said, squatting down and peering at our tires. “Sounds like the brake shoes. I’d get that looked at right away.”
Here we were, on our third day, needing to find a repair shop. Which, it turns out, is not a simple process. You must have permission from Cruise America to take your RV to an approved mechanic. After waiting on hold for twenty-five minutes, I finally reached Jessica, who told me she’d call me back soon with the location of a repair shop.
“It’s three-thirty now, and the service stations close soon,” I told her. “Can’t we just take it to the shop down the street?”
“No, ma’am, we need to find an authorized repair shop. Someone will call you within thirty minutes.”
With nothing else to do but wait, we drove to Walmart for supplies. Walmart is the RVers’ mecca—so many items, for so little money—but today I was anxious about the brakes. I began doing what I do best. I am a news reporter, and I had a deadline. Next to the deli section, I called our Cruise America sales representative and told her our plight, so that two people would be on the case. I hung up and called Directory Assistance for the names and numbers of the seven service stations within a hundred miles of Lexington. Devin appeared and gave me an inquisitive look.
“Just a sec,” I said to him, dialing the first service station. No, the person told me, they don’t service Cruise America RVs. Near the mayonnaise section, Devin tried to get my attention, but I was busy calling the next service station. Devin walked away, a frustrated click to his steps. At the cereal aisle, I received a call from Jessica. Rockbridge Ford in Lexington could fit us in at one p.m. tomorrow. Great! Problem solved. As I was selecting some tomatoes, I called Rockbridge Ford, just to confirm. Bob informed me they don’t fix motor homes.
“You don’t?” I said as Devin hovered nearby, trying to decipher the conversation.
“No, ma’am. I can tell you who does, though.” He gave me some numbers. I thanked him and began to dial the first one.
Devin finally stepped in front of the shopping cart.
“Stop!” he said. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
“What’s wrong?” I said, continuing to dial. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“You’re doing the best you can. That may be true,” he said, a steely undercurrent to his voice. “But this is a ‘we’ thing. There are two of us in this situation. I just want to know what’s happening.”
In that moment, I realized that Devin was pointing at a major perspective problem, a shift I had never really made, even after more than a decade of marriage. I still think in terms of one. Maybe that is a little understandable for someone who was single until forty-three, who developed a career and bought a house on her own, who did not have children or build a family with her husband. But how long is the grace period on “I-ness”? Oh well, I thought, as I tapped in the next number, I’ll worry about that later. It can’t be that big a deal. Can it?
In fact, Robert Levenson, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, told me, “we-ness” is among the most important qualities of a happy marriage.
“If we-ness isn’t there by the time you get to fifteen years,” he said, “you’re in trouble.”
Levenson and several colleagues tracked 156 middle-aged and older couples as part of a longitudinal study that spanned more than twenty years. They were like photographers: Every five years they took snapshots of the marriages, inviting the couples into the laboratory, where they would videotape and code their conversations based on facial expression, body language, and tone of voice, as well as measure their physiological responses. They found that the couples who used “we” and “us” were far happier in their marriages than those who used singular pronouns.17 Levenson says this is not just a matter of grammar.
“It would trivialize it to say, ‘You need to say “we” a lot and you’ll have a happy life together,’” he explains. It goes deeper than that: “It is that mind-set that you’re in this together, that sense of pride that you’ve gotten through the tough times. It’s a really good sign.”18
That long-term study of thriving couples uncovered two other intriguing insights. The most controversial is that the wives are, as Levenson put it, “the emotional centers, the emotional historians, and the emotional thermostats of the marriage.”19
The researchers found that regulating the woman’s emotions during a conflict—not the man’s—predicted happier marriages.20 If a woman calmed down quickly during a fight (recorded in the laboratory)—if her heart rate and other physiological indicators lowered quickly—this predicted marital happiness in both the short and the long term.
“Women have a very complicated job description,” Levenson said. “And one thing we found is that when wives are emotionally taken care of by their husbands, they will help their husbands in moments of conflict. They will invest in the relationship. But if the wives are distressed and not soothed or calmed, they will disinvest, and this is when the couples we studied did not do as well as others.”21
Levenson reaped a whirlwind of trouble for this finding, but I decided to try to put this into practice. I tried not reacting when Devin and I would approach a quarrel, and I was amazed at how quickly arguments were defused. I regretted mentioning this tidbit to Devin, who would jokingly remind me that it was my job to keep an even keel, no matter what he said. Now I understand the backlash.
Even more intriguing is Levenson’s finding that DNA can predict whether or not you will be happy in your marriage.22 UCLA researchers Tom Bradbury and Benjamin Karney made the same surprising discovery: Namely, a certain gene variant, or allele, that regulates serotonin can influence the tenor of a marriage.23 Everyone has two alleles of this gene, one from each parent, and people with two short alleles are far more sensitive to the emotional climate around them, whether in their family of origin or in their own marriage. These people are called “hothouse flowers,” because they blossom when the climate is warm and they wilt when it is cold.
This strikes me as fatalistic and somewhat depressing information. You can’t change your DNA or that of your spouse, so what do you do? Divorce the hothouse flower?
I put the question to Tom Bradbury, who said he initially had the same reaction. But after pondering it, he realized this finding could be useful. Say, for example, you know or suspect your partner is wired to respond to certain stressful circumstances in certain ways. You can do one of two things.
“You can try to change that,” Bradbury said. “You can really bang your head against that wall and criticize your partner. Or you can embrace them. And you are just better off wrapping your arms around them and telling them that everything is going to be okay and that you are going to be standing by their side. That is the applied version of what is really an interesting set of phenomena involving our biology.”
Wednesday, July 3
We were awakened this morning by plink plink plink, like dimes falling on the roof of the RV. They were distinct because they were close: just two feet above Devin’s head and mine. Four days ago, our friends Beth Wahl and Jack Kolpen joined us in Roanoke, Virginia. We offered them the “queen” bedroom at the back, and Devin and I moved to the crawl space above the driver’s seat, since Jack, topping six feet, would have to fold like a Swiss Army knife to fit into that space. The rain gained in velocity until the skies started dropping not dimes but nickels, thunk thunk thunk, until, finally, it sounded as if the Treasury Department was dumping every coin at its disposal. We had chosen the rainiest summer on record for the southeastern United States to drive an RV down the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Beth and Jack are lawyers, as naive about RV operations as we (although Jack did bring bungee cords, which solved many a problem). We sold them on the idea that Jack and I, both avid cyclists, would bike thirty miles down the Blue Ridge Parkway each day, while Beth, Devin, and Sandra Day would pick us up afterward. Then, we promised, we would continue our dream vacation in unsullied campgrounds, hiking a little, and eating dinner under the stars. This idyllic dream almost instantly dissolved: The sun made an occasional appearance each day, but for the most part, it rained. Each day, Jack and I rode our bikes through a downpour as cars whizzed by, sending arcs of rainwater in their wake. Each night, we hunkered down in the increasingly damp RV and ate at the little RV “table.”
Today, our fourth day of almost solid rain, we approached Happy Holiday RV park in Cherokee, North Carolina. The police were stopping traffic. Soon we saw why: Muddy water was cascading down a side street into our road in three-foot-high torrents, reminding me of my days as a camp counselor, when I took campers rafting down the rapids on the Colorado River. The entryway to the campsite was at a standstill, as some RVs were arriving and many more were leaving, getting the hell out of there, trying to find high ground, away from the water moccasins and who knew what else.
“Hotel?” Devin asked.
“Hotel!” we cheered, giddy at the prospect of a dry night’s sleep.
Instantly, our resolve to be true RVers evaporated, with not a flicker of guilt that this might sully the purity of the experience. We headed for a restaurant before realizing the power was out all over town. This is how we ended up at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino at four p.m. Of course the casino had a generator, and the place glowed with the light of a thousand slot machines as several hundred people with dilated pupils robotically fed them coins: an old man in a cowboy hat, a young woman covered with tattoos—what were all these people doing here in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon?
The food court looked like something from Dante’s Inferno, people pushing and shoving to seize the last sandwiches from the dimly lit refrigerated case. By the grace of God, we found sandwiches and salads, and fell in line behind a score of other people, shuffling like the undead toward the cash registers.
We sat by the window, gazing out at the churning creek a hundred feet away, with a concerto of slot machine chimes and bells clanging just over our shoulders.
“My friend asked me if I really wanted to do this,” Beth said. “And I said, ‘Well, we will create memories.’ And, well, we are creating memories.”
I thought: Remember this. This is a very good moment. I was having the time of my life, in no small part because of the company.
Researchers would hardly be surprised. Friends, it turns out, are very good for marriage. Richard Slatcher, an associate professor of social psychology at Wayne State University, found that even friendships created in the laboratory seem to work some magic. He and colleagues put couples who had never met in a room and asked them to discuss personal questions such as: What is the most embarrassing moment of your life? The couples not only reported feeling closer to their partner but also reported more “passionate love” for each other.24 The theory, which is based on Arthur Aron’s premise that novelty triggers romance and passion, prompted the researchers to conclude that the most romantic thing you can do on Valentine’s Day is go on a double date.
During our extended, weeklong double date in a thirty-foot RV, I remembered what Geoffrey Greif told me about couples. He and Kathleen Holtz Deal, both professors at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, interviewed scores of couples for their book Two Plus Two.25 They found that couples who socialize with others say they are happier with their marriage. Greif said that being with others prompts you to stand back and look at your partner with new, appreciative eyes. For example, I became keenly aware of Devin’s dry humor on our trip. You see how other couples treat each other: Does he hold her hand while walking into the restaurant? And maybe you’ll do the same. Greif added that being with others gives you an excuse to make your spouse shine.
“I might say to the other couple, ‘I don’t want to brag but . . . ,’ then you go ahead and brag about your spouse,” he told me. “It can only make your spouse feel better.”
He added that being with others can add chemistry.
“If my wife and I go out with a couple my wife really likes, it makes her very attractive because she is more alive, more fun, is enjoying herself, is excited,” he says. “So you get a chance to see your partner in a new light, and hopefully it’s an attractive light.”26
All of this happened on our trip: I bragged about Devin’s new Global Studies program at the university; I watched as Devin deftly navigated our way down the parkway and into RV parks while the rest of us read, talked, or napped. I was glad he was there. I was glad he was mine.27
NOT ROCKET SCIENCE
An enormous industry revolves around improving marriages, largely by tweaking the way couples communicate and fight. John Gottman, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, has acutely diagnosed the cancers that can kill a marriage: the “four horsemen” of contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling.28 He claims he can watch a couple talking in his famous Love Lab for a few minutes and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will divorce or not.29 He teaches couples how they can move from the “disasters” to the “masters” of marriage (his terms) by changing how they interact. Other psychologists suggest writing about a recent fight from the perspective of a neutral third party, which ideally shifts partners from their myopic perspectives.30 Still others have found watching and discussing romantic movies just as effective as training sessions on acceptance or conflict management.31 And several researchers have concluded that increasing the ratio of positive comments to negative comments will work wonders in a relationship.32
As insightful as these ideas may be, I will not cover them in this chapter. The subject matter is too massive; it would be like trying to stuff an elephant into a mitten. Beyond that, I am a little skeptical of therapies that try to fix communication skills while failing to address the root cause first; that’s like applying topical ointment to a broken wrist. I am also leery of therapies that spend lots of time and money tracing back all problems, marital and otherwise, to one’s childhood; that’s like doing major surgery when you just need the bone set.
Marriage therapist Russell Collins has similar reservations about these prescriptions. Take, for example, the positivity ratio: Five good interactions for every negative interaction leads to a happy marriage.
“It is true,” Collins says. “And one of the things that I sometimes say to people in therapy is, ‘Look, I can save you a lot of time and a lot of money: For every negative interaction, take it upon yourselves as a couple to make sure that you have five positive interactions. And you’re done.’ You really will be.” He paused. “But no one ever does that.”
Collins says it is easy to say but complicated to execute, especially if the foundation of the marriage—the bedrock desire to be married to this person—is rickety.
Collins adds that the social science of relationships is squishy. Unlike, say, architects, who can rely on the principles of mathematics to build a bridge, marriage researchers cannot point to principles that are guaranteed to repair a marriage.
“What tends to happen is people come up with wonderful snippets of verifiable information, and then somebody else picks it up and makes a meal out of it,” Collins says. “So there will be some tiny bit of information that applies to the public at large but may not have any relevance whatsoever to you, your life, and your situation.”
Finally, I had found a practitioner who was not an evangelist, someone who would give me a clear-eyed answer to my nagging question. “Can people who are very different have a really good marriage?” I asked. “Not just survive but have a good marriage?”
“Absolutely,” Collins said. “If they are similar in one thing: They are similar in their longing to be deeply connected, to feel loved, and to feel safe.”
THERAPY ENTERS THE SCANNER
Dr. Sue Johnson is attempting to make a science out of bringing couples back from the brink. The clinical psychologist and founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) cannot promise her method will work with every couple. But hers is the only type of marriage counseling that has submitted to rigorous scientific examination. If brain scans are any guide, she can claim that when you change the way you view your partner, you change not only your marriage but your brain as well.
“For the first time in human history, relationships aren’t a mystery,” the effusive Canadian told me. “We don’t have to base our most important relationships on fairy tales and gossip. We have a map.”
The map lies deep in our brains, and it was drawn millennia ago, in the earliest days of humankind. Humans have always needed other humans to survive, to hunt together and bring home dinner, to protect the tribe from outsiders, to help each other raise children. The most dangerous place was on the periphery of society. The most important connection, from a genetic standpoint, was the one that allowed our genes to survive to the next generation, providing a safe haven and a secure base. What was true thousands of years ago is true today.
“We’re bonding animals,” Johnson said. “Our need for safe emotional connection with a longtime partner is wired in. It’s not sentiment or something we’ve created in our society. It’s wired in and we are strongest and most adaptive and most functional when we can hold hands with a partner and face life together. We all know that deep in our hearts. We just haven’t known how to put it all together.”
Johnson believes she has an inkling: Emotionally Focused Therapy, a form of couples counseling that builds on attachment theory. This theory posits that a person forms a style of attachment as a child and imports that style into marriage. Someone who could count on a warm relationship with his parents usually forms a secure attachment, with them and his future partner. Someone who grew up with inattentive caregivers will worry about being abandoned and will later tend to cling to her partner, seeking reassurance. People who were abused or neglected as children tend to avoid deep connections in marriage to protect themselves from becoming dependent on someone else. The trick is to figure out one’s attachment style and change the dynamics—which in fact rewires the brain.33
In 2011, Sue Johnson recruited twenty-four couples teetering on the verge of divorce and offered them a deal. They would receive EFT couples therapy, and in exchange, the wives would allow their brains to be scanned twice: once before twenty weeks of therapy and once after. For the study, Johnson teamed up with James Coan at the University of Virginia, whom I had met while researching the chapter on friendship and had administered a set of painful electric shocks. As you remember, Coan found that if his subjects were holding the hand of strangers or no one, their brains “lit up like a Christmas tree” in the areas of the brains that processed threat. When they held the hand of someone they trusted, those threat areas remained quiescent, as if their brains did not view the shock as a threat at all.
In Sue Johnson’s experiment—before receiving twenty weeks of EFT—when the disaffected wives held their husband’s hand, the threat areas of their brains became more active than when they held a stranger’s hand or no one’s hand at all.
Coan couldn’t believe it. According to their brains, “it was very clear, they are much better off alone.”
“One of the things we think is happening,” Coan told me, “is if you are in a crappy relationship, it’s not only that you’re running out of money and that the kid is sick and you know you’ve taken all your sick days, so how are you going to deal with this? It’s not only that. But now you’ve got this pain-in-the-butt spouse who’s just adding another problem. And so your brain is having to work even harder because you’ve got this additional problem. When relationships are functioning well, your spouse takes a problem away. If the relationship is not functioning well, this adds an additional problem.”
After twenty or so sessions of therapy, when the couples ostensibly learned to trust each other—as Johnson puts it, to become each other’s safe harbor—the couples returned to the laboratory. One by one, Coan slid the wives (again, only wives for this study) into the brain scanner and found that these women whose brains had preferred to face a painful electrical shock alone than with their husbands were suddenly processing the threat as if they were happily married. In their minds, and in their brains, the husbands had been transformed from threat to ally.
“I was surprised by the magnitude” of the change, Coan said. “I was surprised that after twenty weeks of therapy with couples that were that bad, they looked a lot like our couples in our [previous] study who were very, very happy couples. Right down to which kinds of brain regions were impacted.”34
Sue Johnson said that when you create trust, the other issues seem to resolve themselves.
“You can teach couples how to negotiate about the chores until you’re purple,” she observed. “Or do listening skills, or look to their past. You can do all those things. But it really is all about emotional connection and responsiveness.”
Sunday, July 7
After learning that the forecast was for heavy rain to continue to hover over the Blue Ridge Parkway for the rest of our trip, Beth, Jack, Devin, Sandra, and I picked up stakes three days early and drove to our beloved Candy Hill Campground in Winchester, Virginia, out of the storm system and into the blessed sunshine.
Before Jack and Beth left for home, we toured the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, dutifully walking through the Asian gardens and studying a fine art collection before gravitating toward the museum shop.
Devin showed me a small book, a biography of John Mosby, a Confederate battalion commander in the Civil War.
“Should we get this for Nancy?” he asked, since my eighty-seven-year-old stepmother named her dog Mosby, the latest in a string of golden retrievers named after Confederate war heroes.
“Maybe,” I said, though in the end we decided against.
I would never have noticed that book, nor would I have made the connection between Mosby and Nancy. Which brings me to an embarrassingly corny but useful insight by Gary Chapman, a bestselling author and marriage counselor. You should speak your partner’s love language: that is, how he expresses his affection.
Soon after Devin and I married, I realized that Devin wasn’t fluent in my love language: Words of Affirmation. I live for words of affirmation. I love giving praise, which I do with abandon, whether merited or not. I love receiving praise, when I do a story for NPR, when I give a speech, when I cook a mediocre meal, when I take Sandra Day for an extra walk, when I dress up, when I dress down—it doesn’t matter what the circumstance, I want you to praise me. Muted praise, which is to say ordinary praise, crushes me. I was raised on a high-calorie-praise diet, in which observations are ladled out in superlatives: That was the best speech (said to my brother, David, or me), or You are the smartest yet most honorable businessman (David), or You are a rising star at NPR (me), or You are the most tasteful decorator (Mom), or Your life is so remarkable it should be written up in The Atlantic (Dad). So you can see that a “Hey, good story” would send me into a tailspin.
Initially Devin did not know this, and once we had zoomed past the blush of infatuation, he did not seem inclined to develop this talent. He saw it as false. It took me quite some time to get over Devin’s tendency toward honest assessment. I still don’t much care for it, but I had never stopped to figure out Devin’s “love language,” and there, in the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, I recognized it: Acts of Service. Devin is not showy; he quietly observes, he sees what needs to be done, and does it. He knows I hate balancing the checkbook, and even though he hates it, too, he does all the finances. As his father has lurched from one major health crisis to the next for the past three years, Devin has taken care of all of them: finding a great assisted-living home, selling the house, moving his father, meeting his father’s daily needs, subtly persuading him not to marry the woman whose name he can’t quite remember.
On this trip, Devin held steady when I wobbled. During a flash flood on July 4, after six days of rain, when Jack and Beth and I were ready to abandon the trip and return to D.C., Devin was the one to stay the course, to suggest we drive to Winchester instead of D.C., because, he said, I would never forgive myself for quitting. Devin has been the one who has upheld our marriage, who even in the darkest fights never threatened divorce, never took my bait. He has been a safe harbor that may not be marked with fluttering banners of praise, but he is a shelter from the storm.
THE FRUIT OF NOVELTY
Monday, July 29: Washington, D.C.
Your drawings were interesting,” Art Aron mused.
Devin and I turned in the RV three weeks ago, declaring it truly The Best Vacation Ever. Aron, the psychologist at Stony Brook University whose research on novelty had sparked the idea in the first place, had analyzed the results of our test. If you remember, Devin and I had each drawn a picture before the trip, and again upon our return. Each picture was supposed to include him and me, a car, a house, and a tree. Aron noted that this picture test is “new, not validated yet, but it has ‘face validity,’” which means it makes sense.
I wondered what would be the clue to our marriage relationship: facial expressions, the sun shining, or some other measure?
“We look at how close the necks are.”
“The necks?”
“Yes, we measure the distance between the necks of you and your husband before and after. In your first drawing, it was 10.1 centimeters—in the second, 7.4 centimeters.”
“What about Devin’s?”
“His went from 1.4 centimeters to 1.1 centimeters, which is about the same proportion,” Aron noted.
“So novelty literally brought us closer?”
“It appears so,” he said. Then he added, “There was a dog in all your pictures, which was interesting.”
“Yeah,” I said, “our dog is the center of our universe.”
LEO TOLSTOY WAS WRONG
Middle-aged marriage is riding some pretty rough seas. Couples are abandoning ship so often that researchers have elevated the trend to a cultural phenomenon and assigned it a moniker: the gray divorce revolution. They cite boredom or differences in personality, they point to clashing conflict styles or DNA, they credit greater career opportunities and financial independence for women, they blame a generational focus on “my needs” that encourages people to walk out if those needs are not met. Then again, other researchers claim this is the best of times for the lucky few: These privileged couples enjoy a union of equals, allowing for self-fulfillment, partnership, and safe vulnerability as the old roles are tossed away.
After interviewing countless therapists, researchers, and couples, after reading way too many articles and books about marriage, I arrived at some conclusions. The first is: Leo Tolstoy was wrong. In Anna Karenina, the Russian author famously wrote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But the research reveals countless ways for midlife couples to be happy, and just as many paths for unhappy midlife couples to navigate back to a vibrant partnership.
My second conclusion is related: There is no secret to solving the Rubik’s Cube of midlife marriage, with its rotating demands of children, aging parents, and careers. There are more than enough ideas to keep researchers busy and therapists in business. In fact, every therapy and theory I encountered contained some penetrating insights about reviving marriages that are worn and damaged. Be adaptable, because everything changes. Think in terms of we, not I. Voice five positive comments for every negative one. Be the shelter from the storm for your partner, and he will likely do the same. Rent an RV, or if not, then inject some surprise into your routine. However, you never know whether a particular insight or therapy can restore your partnership, and it would be fraudulent for anyone to promise 100 percent satisfaction or your money back.
Still, I did notice some core ideas that bear repeating. While young marriages die amid crashing plates and angry words, seasoned marriages usually end with a whimper, when both sides stop trying, when they become disconnected and bored, when they quit investing domestically and look abroad. If this is true, as the research suggests, then one insight applies to marriage as well as all other ventures in midlife: Engage with verve, because autopilot is death. Please don’t misunderstand: I am not advocating living out one’s years in a dead or abusive marriage. But if something internal murmurs that this is worth another try—and few decisions in life hold higher stakes for those we love, including children—then consider this: The marriages that beat the odds and escape the gray divorce revolution have been sculpted with intentional hands.